The Fruity Cargo Cult Apple may not be sitting on a $1bn A20 Pro headache after all, according to Ming-Chi Kuo.
Earlier reports claimed TSMC was stuck with $1bn worth of A20 Pro supply because Job’s Mob lacked enough DRAM to finish packaging the chips.
According TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo that claim is mostly hot air. He argues that Job’s Mob and TSMC’s tightly meshed operations are being badly underestimated.
Kuo said Job’s Mob plans chipset production at least three months ahead. The A20 Pro schedule would have been aligned with the available DRAM supply before TSMC started pushing wafers through its shiny new process.
If the two supplies were not aligned, Job’s Mob would have little reason to pay TSMC to mass-produce 2nm chips ahead of schedule.
There would be no financial sense in building a pile of wafers if the final packaging step could not be completed.
TSMC will have work-in-process buffers but running that approach into a known RAM bottleneck would be daft even by corporate standards.
Kuo’s point is that Job’s Mob and TSMC are not exactly new to this lark. Their supply chains run with the sort of precision that makes rivals look like they are operating like chickens with their heads cut off.
For TSMC to be sitting on $1bn worth of stranded A20 Pro chips would imply a serious operational cock-up. That would be out of character for the world’s biggest contract chipmaker.
Some seized on TSMC chief financial officer Wendell Huang’s comments during the company’s second-quarter 2026 earnings call, where he noted higher inventory days.
Kuo said that rise is normal when TSMC begins the early mass production ramp of a next-generation node.
A temporary inventory bump comes with the move to 2nm production. That makes it routine accounting, not proof that expensive Apple silicon is gathering dust.
Job’s Mob is not TSMC’s only 2nm customer either. Qualcomm, MediaTek, AMD, and others are ramping up production, which makes a single-customer disaster story harder to swallow.
If TSMC really had a DRAM-driven packaging breakdown, it would likely be sitting on billions of dollars of unfinished chips from several customers.
Kuo does not deny the DRAM shortage. He has said the memory supply-demand gap is widening and that Job’s Mob could pull in 10 to 20 per cent fewer A20 chips than originally planned.
However, that is not the same as TSMC being lumbered with a truckload of stranded silicon.
There is still chatter that Job’s Mob is trying to secure DRAM from Chinese memory maker CXMT to avoid future supply shocks. That deal may be limited to testing, partly because CXMT’s capacity is not exactly bottomless.
